As ambitious and powerful as Lady Macbeth is in Macbeth, as a woman, she cannot bear the guilt which drives her insane. Comments?

Lady Macbeth is ambitious and, may be, even wicked, but she is definitely ambitious and wicked with a difference. In her second soliloquy in act1 sc.5, she apostrophises to the powers of darkness and evil in order to be cruel enough so that she can stand by the side of her husband in fulfilling his ambition for the throne. In act 1 sc.6, when King Duncan arrives at Inverness, Lady Macbeth plays the role of the hostess with all the studied and affected idiom of hospitality. In act1 sc.7, when the unsettled Macbeth tells her--'We will proceed no further in this business', she remonstrates him with all indignation and sarcasm. She goes to the extent of showing her cruelty in a strained violence of language:'I have given suck, and know/How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:/I would, while it was smiling in my face,/Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,/And dash'd the brains out....'

But in the scene of Duncan's murder, we find Lady Macbeth in visible nervous tension, very apprehensive and appalled by the noises of the night. She is apprehensive whether Macbeth can make the heinous attempt; she is appalled by the owl's cry. She has taken a dose of wine to make her strong, and yet she feels unnerved. She claims that 'Had he not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done 't'. But the conditional claim is doubtful because a woman/mother who could have killed her own child in the most gruesome manner should have killed Duncan all by herself. In act 2 sc.3, Lady Macbeth faints and she is carried out. That seems to be the first manifestation of her mental degenaration ultimately leading to sleep-walking and suicidal death.

Lady Macbeth is very much a woman whose selfless ambition to see her husband on the throne motivates her to invoke the powers of darkness. She invites a moral backlash of remorse and guilt which is manifest in her words of regret in act3 sc.2:'Nought's had, all's spent./Where our desire is got without content:/'Tis safer to be that whichwe destroy/Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy'. In the scene of her sleep-walking, we find a an agonised woman constantly rubbing her hands to remove the imaginary stain and smell of blood. She mutters her sufferings, her doubts, fears, desperation and anguish. No throughly wicked person would have gone through such a mental hell. She dies soon thereafter; dies a pathetic suicidal death.